30 Apr 2023 If you work on codebases any larger than a few lines, at some point you will have to deal with data stored in some sort of document. Inevitably, this type will change, and you’ll need to add, remove, and rearrange fields—while still needing to retain compatibility with stored documents in earlier versions of the format. This is a problem I’ve recently encountered on my side project, Unspool. Even though I’m the only person ever to have used the app, I still found myself iterating on the data structure to make more logical sense—leading to decoding errors and un-openable documents, along with lots of boilerplate that wouldn’t have been sustainable in the long run. (Read...)

29 Mar 2023 I am pleased to announce the side project I’ve been working on for the past 3 months, and hope to release to the public some time this year. It’s called Unspool, and it exists because I’ve recently got back into film photography and wanted a metadata tagging app that doesn’t make me want to throw things. I intend to write a developer blog on my experiences building Unspool at least once a month, to give me accountability to: (Read...)

27 Apr 2021 On 3rd March, Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp (a company that runs an online project management tool and Hey, a privacy-focused email service) tweeted: Company culture is not written down, it’s acted out. A company’s culture is a 50-day moving average of how it is, not how it thinks it is, wants to be, or was supposed to be. Fifty-five short days later, on 26th April, he would publish a long and baffling blog post entitled “Changes at Basecamp. (Read...)

27 Mar 2021 In 2014, a Tumblr post featuring an implausible anecdote involving a homeless man dancing to Gangnam Style and a miserly rich man being shamed in front of a crowd of applauding strangers was posted to Reddit, where it was roundly mocked. Over the years, Oppa Homeless Style, as it became known, became an infamous part of the ‘Tumblr canon,’ a widely-acknowledged example of the absurdity of a platform at the time famed for hosting naïve teens and ‘social justice warriors’ (a term used by people who think opposing social injustice and oppression is a bad thing, for some reason. (Read...)